Enterprises are still in the early stages of integrating content strategy as a discipline, not only into the marketing mix, but also into operations and technology. Multinationals face a much more complex challenge: scaling content across borders, languages, cultures, and teams.

This report examines the specific challenges of creating an effective global content marketing strategy, as well as best practice recommendations.

Global content operations tend to operate either top-down, or bottom up. We learned neither approach works in isolation. Global content groups must enable local territories, but local (regions and/or countries) must be provided with sufficient autonomy to make decisions that will make content appropriate and meaningful within their geographic region. Global, regional, and local should, and must, inform the other.

This report was based on interviews with global content executives from companies including Intel, Visa, Save the Children, DuPont, Cisco, Intel, 3M and many more. It was additionally informed by the work we’ve done crafting global content strategies for some of the world’s leading brands.

Every company is now a media company.
Content Marketing is in high demand, as every company has now realized they are media companies. In fact, our list of Content Marketing Software startups has resulted in calls from VCs, press, brands, and potential competitors. We also know, from our brand survey that Content Marketing is the top go to market priority at corporations. I frequently tell the market that social business tools, like railroad tracks, laid down the infrastructure for many corporations to now talk to the market; the challenge is, they don’t know what to say!

[As every company is now a media company, they must orchestrate content in harmony –or risk marketplace cacophony]

Above: As every company becomes a media company, they must orchestrate content in harmony.

Now, companies must organize for content strategy and marketing.
Altimeter’s latest Open Research report (use, share, and we’ll create more, see our body of research) is now available, on behalf of the analyst Rebecca Lieb, Chris Silva and Christine Tran, and include findings from over 70 interviews from across the industry. Why is this important? Despite an overwhelming trend toward content marketing and the need to continually feed an ever-increasing portfolio of content channels and formats, most organizations have not yet addressed content on either a strategic or tactical level. This report explores scalable organizational models for addressing content needs across the enterprise, and makes recommendations for a holistic program.

Companies organize for content in 6 models:

Content Center of Excellence

Executive Steering Committee

Editorial Board or Content Council

Content Lead

Cross-Functional Content Chief

Content Department/Division

Also included in this report are: Organizational Content Requirements and a Recommendations Checklist that brands can use to become actionable, now. Here’s the report, which we hope you use:

On a side note, as research director at Altimeter, this report will become very useful to deploy as my role is to ‘conduct’ the research reports in harmony, no doubt, I’ll be leaning on Rebecca to complete this task.

Altimeter conducts research on new markets. Altimeter continues our coverage on Content Marketing by Rebecca Lieb (who’s working in conjunction with me on this post and coverage), researcher Jessica Groopman and our co-authored report on Converged Media (Paid, Owned, and Earned). In our research reports, we both identified the market pains, definitions, workflows, and solutions brands are and want to achieve. As part of this ongoing coverage to look at all the elements of the people, process, and technology,

Don’t buy software without a strategy. While we want to explore a list of software providers that are part of the solution. It’s important to note that these software providers are not solutions among themselves. Strategy, content goals, internal organization and often agency services are part of the broader solution set –software rarely solves everything on its own.

Details about this list. This list won’t contain the following sibling market which includes: Social Media Management System Vendors (SMMS), Marketing Automation, Converged Media, Web Content Management (thanks to Adobe’s Chris Nguyen for the reminder) software players. Also, this list was partly compiled thanks to Santiago an investor Emergence Capital, who helped to provide some of the startups for this list, they were one of the first VCs to contact me, as they’re interested in this market. Here’s but one example of how these lists become official research artifact, I started with this crowd collaborated list, which resulted in this buyer’s guide report. I may segment this list once we have a large sample.

Working Definition: Content Marketing Software systems than enable marketers to perform as digital publishers. Features often include analysis, planning, calendar, workflow, optimization, in support of publishing owned content. These tools still require services components of strategy, content planning, content production, and editorial.

Index: Content Marketing Software Vendors To start with, there are 15 vendors Leave a comment below, I’ll review and add. The descriptions are what was listed on the index page of each vendor, I edited to remove hyperbole.

Adobe Creative Cloud: Monthly membership gives you the entire collection of CS6 tools and more for video, print, media.

Compendium: Compendium is a content marketing platform that helps organizations capture and create original content in a branded hub for distribution to any marketing channel.

Kontera: Understands web-wide “conversations” and current interest trends, and uses this information to provide actionable insights and to activate the ideal brand supporting content within Display, Mobile and Social environments. (Submitted by Josh Berman)

Marketing.AI: Workflow, audit, and analytics applications that help B2B marketers be more successful with content they publish themselves, such as blog posts, website pages, and social media updates. (Submitted by colleague Rebecca Lieb)

VisualRevenue: Real-time analytics solution that is designed specifically to enhance the hand of editors in data driven newsrooms. (Submitted by colleague Rebecca Lieb)

Voraka: (aka writer in Sanskrit) is a writer management engine that manages writers, coordinates the content needs and deliverables of multiple teams, and helps in the delivery of great content regularly

Zemanta: Is a service that helps publishers by suggesting related posts, pictures, relevant in-text links and tags you can enrich your posts in a way to get more traffic, more clicks, more recommendations and to make your posts look more attractive. (Submitted by Jason Miller)

April 18 (The day after). I’ve scrubbed the many comments, FB posts, and Google+ comments. The list has gone from 15 to 27 vendors. I’m struggling with including visual presentation type vendors, as that’s going to be a much broader category that could even span Photoshop/Aviary, so I want to be careful about how far I go. The other market is content analytics, as this could span into big data vendors and beyond. I’ve made several new contacts, received a ton of new information, and am very grateful for the market feedback. We all learn together.

April 22: I’ve updated a few more, they’re still coming, but the submissions appear to be slowing. Market set is around 30 folks, I sense at few different categories within this single segment, some high level categories are emerging in the comments.

April 30: Added 4 more, with help of Rebecca Lieb, Visual Revenue, Springpad, Editorially. Also Collective Bias (Thanks Zena). We’re struggling to manage scope, as curation toolset and analytics and CMS are creeping in. This list now has over 40 startups.

May 7: Added in Trap:it after conferring with Rebecca.

May 10: Added Relaborate.

May 17: Added Expion, which is interesting as they’re the first SMMS vendor to formerly launch these tools that I’m aware of.